Tailoring Privacy to User Preferences and Privacy Regulations

slides

Abstract:

Web personalization has demonstrated to be advantageous for both online customers and vendors. However, its benefits are counteracted by privacy concerns. Personalized systems need to take these into account, as well as privacy laws and industry self-regulations that may be in effect. When these constraints are present, they not only affect the personal data that can be collected, but also the personalization methods that can be used to process the data. Our research aims at maximizing the personalization benefits while at the same time respecting the currently prevailing privacy constraints. Since such privacy constraints can change over time, a systematic and flexible mechanism is needed that can cater to this dynamics. We developed a user modeling architecture based on software product lines that supports architecture-level configuration management to dynamically select personalization methods that satisfy current privacy constraints. We describe a pilot experiment with an existing user modeling server and an architecture-based development environment.

Bio:

Alfred Kobsa is a Professor in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Irvine. Before he was a Director of the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Essen, Germany. Dr Kobsa's research lies in the areas of user modeling and personalized systems (with applications in the areas of information environments, expert finders, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people), privacy, and in information visualization. He is the editor of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, editorial board member of the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), World-Wide Web, and Universal Access in the Information Society, and was the founding president of User Modeling Inc. Dr. Kobsa edited several books and authored numerous publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation. He also co-founded a national workshop series and an international conference series in these areas. He received research awards from the Humboldt Foundation, Google, and several other organizations.